Lady Gaga

Joanne

She remains in a state of full control throughout the album, and by album’s end it’s clear that Gaga has released one of her most dazzling albums to date.

Joanne is not as brazen and bold as it could have been, but it’s merely a temporary beat in the timeline of an artist who’s earned the right to stray down a path, be it a disco-lit runway or a dusty road ... With Lady Gaga, it’s never a question of “why,” but “why not?”

A pop album with a capital P, when Gaga talked about stripping back, she obviously meant doing away with the pretensions- Joanne is, unmistakably, still a slick operation.

Joanne, Artpop’s proper follow-up, contains no ham-fisted attempts at authenticity. Instead, Gaga tries to find a middle ground between her sophisticated present and glitzy, electropop past.

Gaga isn’t naked on Joanne, but she has stripped off the flank steaks and AutoTune. The result is a work that may not close any circles, but instead start the pattern of a new shape: something weird, but compelling, and largely authentic.

She may flit from one musical style to another, rather like Madonna has always done, but she never gives anything less than total commitment. The less is more production suits her, and for a first time we get a real and lasting glimpse of Stefani herself.

‘Joanne’ is certainly not the all-conquering opus it was intended to be and will prove divisive, but it remains a daring and exciting record, delivered from one of modern pop’s most unique and singular voices.

Joanne is Lady Gaga's best album in five years, since the disco-stick hair-metal manifesto that was Born This Way.

Where previous Gaga albums were high-wire acts, Joanne is decidedly earth-bound, a record made by an artist determined to execute only the stunts she knows how to pull off.

Nobody wants to immediately recognize herself in Gaga’s aesthetic; we want her to suggest a path we hadn’t thought of before, to nurture and clarify a beauty we didn’t even realize was there. Joanne feels too self-conscious, an affront to the Gaga of yesteryear—the truest self, after all, isn’t always the quietest.